While a certain setting of Pathfinder’s ancestral system greatly inspires the City of Seven Seraphs project, you might be surprised how much a couple other influences helped to shape our planar metropolis… (Though probably a lot less so after today’s art preview.)

Enemies of the City of Seven Seraphs: The Undreamt

Sometimes called the Faceless Kings, the creatures known as the Undreamt are among the most ancient beings in creation. When the Eternals of the Elder Age and the Divinities of the First Prayer made war large swathes of Creation were ceded by one side of another, dividing the nascent multiverse into a patchwork of conflicting Divine Law. On rarer occasions, these territories where so powerful, contentious, or corrupted by the energies of this conflict that both sides abandoned them simultaneously.

These places became bubbling oceans where the magics and spiritual systems in them suddenly collapsed without their supernatural support structure and cosmic laws. Most things within were destroyed outright or driven insensate by madness made physical. All but the powerful were said to collapse and dissolve.

Those powerful enough to remain called themselves the Undreamt.

With wills mighty enough to arrange new physiologies and mindsets, these Faceless Kings found their war-torn paradises and great cities cast into the depths of Far Realms. They shaped the other malleable entities of their new homes and preserved their greatest cities. Vessels of living tissue and godless flesh were made to sail the churning seas of the Forgotten Worlds. And when they had structured kingdoms from these sickened, abandoned, and lawless places…

…They turned their eyeless visages once more to the Eternals and Divinities that had left them formless.

* * * * *

Fans of the Mythos of Lovecraft and the arcane ships of the ancestral system’s first fantasy-space campaign are in for quite a treat as the Docks of the City of Seven Seraphs open the waters of the Sea of Star and Shadow to the multiverse. Ships sailing the dual-reflections of the Seas’ waters can find themselves slipping through the dark of night into the Seas of the Prime Worlds. Ships baring magic enough can instead bridge the Straight of Reflections and rise into the starry voids of an infinite array of worlds. And waiting for them in the starless Realms beyond stand the Undreamt with strange biocraft and new corruptions to threaten our heroes with.